Merry Christmas

"La Navidad" - a gift to the public domain, by Antonio "Aguijarro" Guijarro Morales

Advent art - initial reflections

As "stf" has commented, it is worth my reflecting upon what is behind my unwillingness to let go of control over the finished product of my Advent art (presented over the past several blog posts). But I do think that a big part of it was simply that I was trying to do too many things with that one project. I wanted to give the children something to do if they got bored or antsy during the sermon at church, but I wanted that to be more than "busy work". I wanted something beautiful for Advent. I used the project myself as a sort of meditative preparation exercise for Christmas.I wanted something that would link Junior Church with the all-age Christmas Day service. I liked the idea of a mystery that would become more and more understandable during Advent, to be revealed completely on Christmas.

And my other inspiration, besides the original stained glass window linked to yesterday, was Sarcastic Lutheran's congregationally-made Advent Icon. [She's moved her blog and I cannot track down the post right now to link to it, but it was created entirely of ad circulars - a transformation of the materialistic (and rubbish) into something holy.]

All this was too much burden for a single project to carry!!

Yet this is not to dismiss stf's comment lightly. As I move into ministry, leading and serving congregations, I will come up with liturgical suggestions which congregations will dislike, or find boring, or confusing. People will "mess up" my beautifully-designed plans. I do need to remember that worship is Process, not Product. May we all feel prepared, at the end of even the most muddled and "imperfect" corporate worship, to go forth to love and serve the Lord at home, at work, in our families and our communities.

advent art, part 4

It was a rush to get the collage ready for 4th Advent. I wasn't yet finished when stf came to collect me for Junior Church, so I brought the supplies with me. Once we'd got the classroom set up with our Godly Play materials, I sat down at a work table and carried on.

photo by seethroughfaith (I cropped most of myself out of it)

To my great disappointment, I realized that I had left at home the thick black magic marker with which I had planned to outline all the elements. This would have made Mary and Joseph's sleeves clearer, for example, and would have allowed me to draw in Jacob's staff. I had also still been undecided about whether to draw in windows and doors on some of the background houses, as in the original I had based this work on. But I just had to do without all that. 

photo by seethroughfaith

I have now turned the work over to the pastor, along with one important additional element - a manger, with a little head just visible nestled within the hay, surrounded by a golden halo. This will be attached to the poster collage as part of the all-age service on Christmas Day. I can't wait to hear whether and how this worked in the service (I'll be with my mother-in-law across Christmas, not here), and to see how it looks with the manger added.

(In all the rush, there was certainly no time to go over it all with a coat of Modge Podge, as I'd hoped. The pastor may find that some of the scraps begin to lift or curl. They can just be carefully left alone, or gently stuck down again with glue or paste. I hope to finish it off in the ways I'd intended after Christmas, maybe even in time for Junior Church on New Year's Day.)

advent art, part 3

By the third week in Advent, a good deal more of the picture had taken shape.

At least one child was pretty sure that this was going to be a picture of Jesus. 

(background: part 1, part 2)

advent art, part 2

(continued from yesterday)

Another problem with my art idea was that I wanted the children to be surprised by the end result. This meant not being able to tell them very much about why they were doing this cutting and pasting, and why everything was supposed to be the same color. So they lost interest fairly quickly. In hindsight, this seems a fairly obvious flaw in my plan!

And the final problem was that I found I was too invested in how I wanted this project to turn out. It wasn't primarily about the process - the final product was also extremely important to me. So I was really unable to let the children work on it freely. In the end, I did most of the work on this project myself. I did have a little help from one of the children (and another adult) on Thanksgiving Day, and three other adults gave me a little help on a couple of Sundays. But the bulk of it was me.

By the second Sunday of Advent (our first Junior Church session in Advent), I was able to place this in the room:

When asked, I explained that it was Advent art. I tried to remind them of the work they'd put into it the previous month (I'm not sure any of them really made the connection), and explained that it would be finished gradually during Advent. I wondered what they thought it might be. One suggested a boat (you can see the prow of the boat there in brown). Another said it looked like it would be a castle. Another suspected that we'd eventually see a priest in the middle. 

More tomorrow...

advent art, part 1

Way back when we had the children in Big Church for Fr Rupert's last service with us, I invited the children  to do some cut and paste work during the sermon. I had brought background shapes cut out of heavy card and asked them to cut out and paste scraps of similarly-colored paper onto them.

This was not an unqualified success. The biggest problem was that I'd set up so that they could choose whether to work on the floor or kneeling in front of chairs, using the chair as a desk... without having thought about the fact that every time a glue stick came down on a chair, a BANG would echo around our stone chapel.

the very beginning of this year's Advent art

More of the story of this year's Advent art will be posted tomorrow!